Stacker
by trismegistus1
Summary: Not everybody's mutation is a pair of angel wings. WARNING: contains fairly graphic depictions of an eating disorder. Proceed at your own discretion.


Title: Stacker  
  
Author: trismegistus  
  
Rating: Umm. A hard R for some depends-on-your-squeamishness descriptions of a person with an eating disorder; proceed at your own caution.  
  
Character: Fred Dukes.  
  
Summary: Not everybody's mutation is a pair of angel wings. Inspired by Sam Lipsyte's "Snacks," a painful-in-the-good-way story of an obese boy dealing with issues.  
  
It wasn't till after puberty that Freddy started inflating like a zeppelin preparatory to takeoff. Up till then he'd been merely big, the sort of big that inspired the attachment of the suffix "-boned" to the end of it and the ocassional usage of synonyms like "husky." But Freddy wasn't fat, no, not some lumbering and oafish loaf of flesh. He had the mesomorphic build of one destined to be one of life's great defensive backs, a strapping frame that would have made a brilliant foil to any overly eager tight end or safety.  
  
Then things changed.  
  
His ma, a no-nonsense shoot-from-the-hip kind of woman, frowned when he first tore his jeans. She came back from work the next day with a pair of 30 longs; those lasted all of a week. The next, they moved on to 36s. The week after that, they started shopping at the big and tall store, even though Freddy wasn't of a particularly impressive stature.  
  
His ma wasn't pleased. "Dammit, if you don't stop gettin' fatter, boy, I'm gonna go broke what from the pants I keep on buying you."  
  
His father was distant, dismissive. "Ain't he supposed to be growing the other way around?"  
  
Freddy pretended not to hear.  
  
***  
  
For dinner, this was what he would have: a small mixed salad, carrots, three thinly sliced tomatoes. Seltzer water, to help his digestion. If he was lucky, some hot tea to quell the treacherous grumblings of his stomach.  
  
His mother would watch him till he'd put away his plate and retired to his room for the night.  
  
One night, shortly after the musty beginnings of the salad-and-seltzer days of his youth, he looked at himself in the mirror--really looked, in the critical unflinching way that a fellow does only to himself, and nobody else. He turned, considering the back of his neck folded up like the topography of a foothill range.  
  
Freddy's hands were swift.  
  
The thing that surprised him about the process was how difficult it was; Freddy had to marshall all his strength to keep his fingers lodged in his throat. His body rebelled; his throat convulsed around his fingers. His vision blurred. Freddy twitched, impotently.  
  
His ma came in the bathroom, the door left unlocked.  
  
She smacked him along the back of his head. His fingers flew out of him, along with the liquefied remnants of his dinner.  
  
"Moron," she grumbled. She shook her head and left him lying on the floor in a pool of his own waste.  
  
The next day, Freddy woke to find a cannister of pills on his nightstand.  
  
"Take'em once a day," Freddy's ma told him over breakfast: one egg, boiled. She stared at his hands as if they were grotesque, things mangled and diseased.  
  
***  
  
He was thirteen, and already weighed over 250 pounds. This, on a 5'5" frame, was not a good thing.  
  
Freddy's doctor was fascinated.  
  
"He could be reacting to the chitosan," his doctor mused.  
  
Freddy's ma said, "The what?", and Freddy tried not to notice the way the words fell like gravel from her mouth.  
  
The doctor nodded, like he was pretending that Freddy's mom understood, and he repeated himself. "The chitosan. It's a shellfish extraction in the pills you've got Frederick on; its proponents claim that it congeals fatty residude and slows down fat cellular build-up, but that's only been verified in controls, with lab animals. I had reservations when you told me you were putting him on Stacker 3, but now I'm telling you that if he's reacting adversely to the pills, you should take Frederick off them entirely."  
  
"Nope," Freddy's ma said. She crossed her arms over her chest the way she did when he asked if he could go to the arcade with his friends after he'd spilled Tang on her new shag carpet. "If it weren't for those pills, he'd be eatin' me outta house an' home. Can't ya do somethin' bout that?"  
  
His doctor's office was wallpapered with bears holding bright neon balloons.  
  
Freddy coughed. The air conditioning in the room was setting his skin to tremble in little Jello quivers. A thin sheen of sweat gathered in the fold of fat where the inward dip in his back should have begun.  
  
The doctor clicked on the overhead light and leaned down into Freddy's face. "Tell me Frederick, are you having any difficulty breathing?" His forehead shone, sickly and sticky, like meat left out too long to thaw.  
  
***  
  
He grew heavy and round like the moon careening towards its lunation.  
  
He became the excuse for the school's gentry to make attempts at wit; sneers were routinely supplemented with the delivery of epithets like fat-ass, lard-ball. Then they discovered the thesarus, and Freddy was in for a whole new world of joy.  
  
Nobody would touch him; the stretch marks of his skin pulling desperately against his bulk frightened away those who'd claimed friendship before. He started smoking; he had heard that smokers shed weight like others did sweat. He didn't, though--lose weight, that is to say. Instead, his breathing became more labored.  
  
The pills never took hold. He became jittery, irritable. He tripled his dosage without telling his mother; all that happened was he lost his temper thrice as fast. Once, after a particularly nasty bout of Freddy-bashing, he put a fist through a locker door. He stared at the hole in awe.  
  
Freddy grew. He passed out of contemptibility and straight-on through into the absurd. Wasn't normal, his peers whispered when he passed, the heft of him held together miracle-like. He became sacred, holy, like a latter-day Buddha. Their taunts evaporated.  
  
One day, after his transfiguration, Freddy came across a girl being shoved by a circle of boys.  
  
He reacted swiftly. His hands came down on their backs, and they crumpled in orbit around him. The boys fled; the girl mumbled gratitude, before doing the same.  
  
His hands were splotched with red. Freddy smiled.  
  
When he got home, he threw away the pills.  
  
***  
  
Author's notes: I apologize to any of y'all who actually do have an E.D. whom I might have offended with this. It's such a tricky subject, and I did the best that I could with what I was able to research, but...*sigh*. I can only hope that I'm treating it with the gravity it deserves. Again, I apologize if I offended any of y'all with this, but I suspect that such a thing would have been a part of Fred's adolescence, and--well, yeah. Nobody ever said mutations had to be pretty. *Sigh*. 


End file.
